The Good Husband of Zebra Drive (2007)

Some said that they would have liked to live before the colonial era, before Europe came and carved Africa up; that, they said, would have been a good time, when Africa ran its own affairs, without humiliation. Yes, it was true that Europe had devoured Africa like a hungry man at a feast—and an uninvited one too—but not everything had been perfect before that. What if one had lived next door to the Zulus, with their fierce militarism? What if one were a weak person in the house of the strong? The Batswana had always been a peaceful people, but one could not say that about everybody. And what about medicines and hospitals? Would one have wanted to live in a time when a little scratch could turn septic and end one's life? Or in the days before dental anaesthetic? Mma Ramotswe thought not, and yet the pace of life was so much more human then and people made do with so much less. Perhaps it would have been good to live then, when one did not have to worry about money, because money did not exist; or when one did not have to fret about being on time for anything, because clocks were as yet unknown. There was something to be said for that; there was something to be said for a time when all on had to worry about was the cattle and the crops.

"Men and boys think that we would like to be them," she said. "I don't think they know how pleased we are to be women."

Great feuds often need very few words to resolve them. Disputes, even between nations, between peoples, can be set to rest with simple acts of contrition and corresponding forgiveness, can so often be shown to be based on nothing much other than pride and misunderstanding, and the forgetting of the humanity of the other—and land, of course.

It was so bright outside, with the winter sun beating down remorselessly, and the air thin and brittle, and everything in such clear relief. Under such light our human failures, our frailty, seemed so pitilessly illuminated. Here he was, a mechanic, not a man who was good with words, not a man of great substance, just an ordinary man, who had loved an exceptional woman and thought that he might be good enough for her; such a thought, when there were men with smooth words and sophisticated ways, men who knew how to charm women, to lure them away from the dull men who sought, so unrealistically, to possess them.

Mma Ramotswe sighed. "We cannot make all our clients happy, Mma. Sometimes, maybe. It depends on whether they want to know what we tell them. The truth is not always a happy thing, is it?"